Tag Archives: awareness

From the moment we leave our house for our daily walk along the river, I am assaulted by the songs of cardinals. Within a couple of blocks, the robins and the sparrows join the chorus, and I am thankful for the naked trees so that I can stop occasionally and spot them. The trees’ spring attire is not quite ready to wear, so the bare branches allow me easy viewing.

The cardinal throws his head back when he sings, as do the sparrows. I am reminded of yoga’s lion pose which relieves tension in the face, and is considered a quick beauty treatment. Is the cardinal vain? Or just happy? The colour of raw sienna – a gorgeous red-brown would make me vain and happy, too.

A cardinal family (there are four of them) endure all four seasons in my backyard; like squirrels, they are territorial. Once squirrels have set up house, they’re in for a long-term lease. It took me many summers of chasing squirrels from my flower beds; the pesky rodents constantly digging up the spring bulbs, and messing with my equilibrium before I conceded that they owned the garden, not me. I waved the white flag many years ago. (I wanted my equilibrium back.) Cardinals give me joy, not loss of equilibrium.

A few blocks into our walk and we pass a rather beautiful old church that after many years of neglect and emptiness was sold to some lucky homeowner. Slowly over the past two or three years, we have noticed new windows on one side of the church and on the manse’s side walls. Other than some shiny new eave troughs, and maybe new soffits, the house still looks neglected and empty.

Last week when I walked by the church I mentioned to my husband that I would like to see inside the church – I’m curious and would like a sneak peek. My husband laughed since we never see anyone around the building after all these years (and daily walks).

Strangely enough, my intention came true the very next morning: the double side doors (a second entrance or exit) were wide open. The stone wall that surrounded the doors had been knocked out to allow for a new set of bigger, black steel doors.

But since we were staring into a huge gape in the wall we were privy to the interior. With curiosity (or nosiness) both of us gawk into the hall which was once either the nave or sanctuary, and it is now empty, except for two beat-up old trucks. Yes, you read that correctly – trucks are now sitting in the church’s sanctuary.

I’m disappointed. Serendipity or not, trucks were not my intention.

Our walk takes a meander today as our usual route is disturbed – the perennial road work has begun. Some people think of spring bulbs in April; we think of road work. Our end of the city has been in the midst of a bigger plan for many years now.

After we navigate the dug up, sand-covered road, we reminisce of the past summer when our road was torn up for six long months, and the dust that settled in our house (in spite of closed windows) was thick. On Fridays at six (when the road crew ceased work for the weekend) I would run around dusting and cleaning my window sills and table surfaces and I would fling open all the windows. Breathe. Just breathe.

We spent the summer talking to the men and women who worked on the road, and watched as other neighbours spent their days yelling at them. We shook our heads at the futility of anger. Road work is like cement – it settles in for the long haul.

Road work is cyclical – every thirty some years the work that is completed (today) will need to be replicated. Apparently there is no guarantee for sewer pipes.

I remember when they did our roads over thirty years ago because my sons were toddlers, fascinated by the heavy machines. Each day I dressed them in their warm jackets and hats, and put them in the twin buggy that my parents bought us when we learned we were having twins. My parents ordered that double pram from England; they were so proud of that pram and used to argue over who would push our sons – Nanny or Papa? Our sons didn’t care; road work and heavy machinery beat grandparents any day!

We would approach the empty holes in the road and park the buggy in a safe, out-of-the-way spot, and hunker down for the morning – our sons would lean over the side of the pram as if they wanted to join in the dirt, waving to the men (sorry, no women working the machines back then). The men waved back, shouting at the boys which only made my sons try harder to escape the confines of the seat.

Afterwards, we would walk to the library where we would carefully choose books on diggers, excavators, bulldozers, and backhoes. The bulldozers were a favourite. Richard Scarry’s Book of Cars, Trucks and Things and Busy, Busy World were borrowed so many times that the librarians just handed them over to me when I arrived.

So to this day I smile when I see the bulldozers arrive and wonder if young moms and dads and children in tow still wander over to the huge pits in the road to watch the great machines in action.

After we have detoured because of road blocks, we walk by a house with stained-glassed windows, one designed with an inlaid cross in its’ centre. It’s quite beautiful, and I am surprised that I have never noticed the cross before today.

Yellow forsythia, in full bloom, surrounds the home, and carefully planned yellow daffodils are planted in the foreground. I marvel at the perfect match as I am acutely aware of how difficult it is to plan colour schemes in our gardens – our gardens have a mind of their own and colour palettes are not of their design.

Some of the daffodil blooms are unopened, and their little heads bow as if in prayer. The religious symbol that shines above them is inspiring the plant life, I notice.

Soon we walk past the long-term care home where my father lived his last three months. We have passed this home for over thirty years, every day, so it seemed right that my father would live there in his final days when he became palliative. I no longer avoid the building (like I used to).

We pass residents from the home most days: we smile, we stop and chat, we help someone return to the lobby. In the past we have joined staff searching for residents who went on a walkabout; we yell the resident’s name over and over, running up and down the street. Eventually everyone is found; perhaps for a brief time those residents are happy. Sometimes lost is a good state.

Over the years, the residents disappear, and new ones take their places – that’s a lesson we all learn when we volunteer at a long-term care home. Life is transient and fleeting, so I counter that with mindfulness and awareness. It’s how I find equilibrium in my life. And acceptance.

Soon we pass a dilapidated, old wreck of a house where a peculiar-looking woman works in her garden most days. I can hear my mother’s voice in my head, It doesn’t cost a penny to spruce up the house. Sweep or rake, either will fix things up. From the rundown state of the house, the owner cannot hear my mother’s voice.

I call the owner eccentric because she is often dressed out of season, and rather bizarrely: shorts and boots in the winter; long, sloppy pants in the summer, that drag in the soil. And always a huge, rather ugly hat. Like the house, her hat is in decline. Her face is weather-beaten and she is very thin, so my husband thinks she should spend some of her money on food, and not on her garden, because she is always planting little green things (which seem to never sprout or grow).

And she often plants fake, dollar store tulips in her garden, too, among the real green things. I am rather fascinated by her garden techniques – freshly-dug garden beds every week, where the only things that seem to survive are the whirly-gigs that she plants among the green things (that do not).

And each spring her dollar store tulips that she planted in the fall (I know, fake tulips do not act like spring bulbs) become sodden messes of blanched yellows and reds in the winter. The snow and wind are brutal – fake or not, tulips cannot survive Canadian winters.

See, even the tulips are fleeting. Whatever creative urge possessed her to plant fake tulips has now died. Creative urges do that; die, that is.

I’ve returned home and now the narratives that existed in my head when I walked are gone – only vestiges of them remain when I type up this post.